Lucía Ortiz de Zárate
Pre-doctoral researcher in Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Autonomous University of Madrid
Medicine is one of the most promising application areas for Artificial Intelligence. The use of these intelligent systems could lead to a very significant improvement in diagnostics, disease detection, etc. Along these lines, the article by Agbavor and Liang of Drexel University looks at how the latest version of Open AI's chatbot, GPT-3, can be used in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's and dementia.
Language impairment (decreased response time to certain questions, changes in sentence structure, etc.) is an important marker for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases. Using 237 voice recordings from the ADReSSo Challenge database, the researchers trained the GPT-3 algorithm and showed that it can detect the onset of Alzheimer's with a hit rate of 80 %. These results match and, in some cases, exceed the hit rates of other conventional Alzheimer's detection models and tests.
Although these results are promising, the study has some important limitations that point to the need for further, larger and more detailed studies. The sample with which we have worked in this case is low, therefore, in order to be able to verify the real usefulness of this and other chatbots it will be necessary to have much larger samples that allow a greater generalisation of the results of the study. In addition, it is important to note the possible presence of biases and other ethical issues in the samples used that need to be addressed to ensure that AI works equally well in diagnosing people of any gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, etc. In this sense, studies of this kind highlight the need to incorporate an ethical perspective in any AI study applied to society.